


if she could

by groove_bunker



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 06:12:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6459016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groove_bunker/pseuds/groove_bunker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Root's the first person Shaw's ever met who makes her want to fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if she could

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't gotten around to seeing all of S4 yet, but this has been sitting on my laptop for ages.

At first glance, Sameen Shaw and Samantha Groves are similar people.  
Hell, even their childhood nicknames are the same, even if Shaw would have bloodied your nose if you used it on the schoolyard. Her mother did not escape Iran for her to not be called by her first name, thank you very much.   
They both like black leather and guns, they’re both always the smartest people in the room, unless Harold’s there, they’re both incredibly good at what they do.   
They’re both good at staying alive.   
Underneath it all, they’re very different. Polar opposites.   
Shaw doesn’t know how to love. She’s observed enough people in love to know how to pretend, to mirror the emotions, but they’ve never been real. She’s at peace with it now, she understands that it’s not something you can learn, that she’s like a machine, hardwired to be this way.   
Sometimes, she wishes Harold had written her software, written her to learn as she went along, written her to feel. He would have been good at that.   
Root knows all too well how to love. She loved her mother. She loved Hannah. She loved her father. Love comes easy to Root, easier than nearly anything else. But so then does heartbreak. First at her mother’s death, then Hannah’s, then at having to leave her father behind. So like Shaw, she’s learnt to pretend. She pretends that love is hard for her, impossible perhaps. It’s easier this way, easier to dedicate herself to the Machine when she’s alone, when she has no one close to her to be hurt.   
She’s tried to overwrite her own software so many times, introducing virus after virus, drinking until she can’t feel. But in the morning, all she does is feel the pain in her head and the pain in her heart.   
Opposites attract.   
And when they collide, the results are spectacular. 

Harold would never admit it, but he’s more than a little afraid of Shaw.   
Sure, she’s on their side, but she’s a little too unpredictable for his liking. Being around Shaw is like running across a minefield. He’s grown used to it, but it’s still not comfortable.   
One day, John’s busy working a case, Fusco with him as per usual. So when a new number comes in, he has to call her, which is a lot easier now that she carries a cell phone. Part of trying to fit in with the rest of society, according to Root. He gets her voicemail but leaves a message, nothing more than the address he’ll be sitting outside of all day, and sure enough, she opens the passenger door around lunchtime, a parka pulled over her work clothes, scoffing a burrito.   
“New number?” Or something like that. It’s hard to tell through a mouthful of half chewed Mexican food.   
“Yes, his name is John Smith. As far as I can tell, he works in this building.”   
“John Smith? Sounds like a fake name to me.”   
“It may well be, he has almost no digital footprint. I’m doing my best to track something, anything, down.” Harold gestures to his laptop.   
“You won’t find anything on there.” Harold notices Shaw flinch at the sound of Root’s voice. That’s…new, “John Smith, as Sameen delicately pointed out, does not exist. She wants us to…well, I’m not sure what yet, but she wants us to find something more. Something deeper. This is bigger than a number.”   
“And she told you that?”   
“Getting jealous Sameen? I’ve still got time for you, don’t you worry. In fact, if all is going well, we’ll be having dinner tonight. You know where. I’ll be waiting.”   
And with that, she’s gone as fast as she came and Harold can’t help but notice that Shaw’s squeezing beans all over the floor of his car. Not that he dares to complain.   
“I gotta go, Finch. My boss hates me as it is. I’ll see you around.”   
And she’s gone, just as fast as Root. When he sees her again, later, in the subway, he can smell the cheap whiskey on her breath as she plays with Bear. She sways slightly when she gets up to leave and he knows he should ask, knows he should offer her a ride home, knows that she doesn’t want to talk about it.   
So he lets her go. 

Root’s right. As usual.   
The building’s a front for Vigilance. They get away, again, but not before Shaw gets grazed by a bullet and Fusco watches Root’s face drop as she goes down. She goes to run towards Shaw and then stops herself suddenly, as if she’s correcting herself. Fusco notices. He wonders if anyone else notices. Reese is already there, he’s helping her up while Root wrings her hands and grits her teeth. She can’t stop staring. Fusco can’t stop watching.   
“She’s going to be fine.”   
“Until she’s not…I mean, I know she’s going to be fine.”   
“It’s ok to want her to be fine, you know? You don’t all have to pretend that you’re all bulletproof.”   
She tears her eyes away from the scene in front of her just long enough to flash him a smile.   
“Oh Lionel…if we didn’t pretend we were bulletproof, we’d never get anything done.”   
He guesses it’s true. 

The Mayhem Twins, Root calls them. John kind of likes it. He likes Shaw a whole lot more than he does Root, trusts her with his life. In some ways, she’s a lot like Kara. In others, she’s most definitely not. He’s pretty sure she’s not going to try and kill him though.   
He’s sitting on a park bench, watching her walk Bear. He knows she know he’s watching and he knows that if it wasn’t for Samaritan, she’d be over here in a flash and break his nose. But they can’t know each other. It’s still not safe.   
Root, on the other hand, is a law unto herself. He watches as she deliberately bumps into Shaw, the way that Shaw straightens up to give this stranger a piece of her mind.   
He notices the way Shaw stiffens the moment she realises who the stranger is.   
He knows better than to blue jack Shaw’s phone, but he can tell that she’s uncomfortable with whatever it is that Root is saying. Root smiles and Shaw’s eyes flash. Root touches her arm and Shaw looks like she’s going to puke.   
Root leaves and Shaw looks like she’s going to cry. 

Shaw still can’t feel anything for Root.   
Actually, that’s a lie. She feels a lot of things, most of them connected to the pull in her lower abdomen whenever she hears the other woman’s voice, or the way her breath quickens when she realises Root’s in the room.   
If there’s one thing Shaw’s always been good at, it’s lust. You don’t need a lot of emotional capacity to feel lust.   
Which is why she’s surprised by how she feels after the first time they fuck.   
(in the subway carriage, quick because they don’t know when Harold’s going to be back, Shaw pressed against the wall, Root’s hand shoved down her pants, Root’s teeth in her neck)   
She expects the shaking and the nausea and the light headedness to go away.   
Instead she just feels empty. She feels wanting. She hates that she cannot care. 

Root tries to get her alone a lot after the first time.   
(the second is in the store room at Sameen’s work, up against cardboard boxes, Shaw screaming against Root’s hand. the third is under the stars against the bike, slowly but with the same kind of rush as before.)   
Because even if Sameen can’t care about her in the same way, at least she can feel this. She can feel the way Root’s hand tightens around her throat, the scratches down her sides. And if she can’t show Sameen that she cares in any other way, she can give her orgasms until she can’t stand up, she can make her see stars and pass out, because something is always better than nothing, right?

Everything is fine until one day it’s not.   
One day, Shaw rolls over to find Root leaving. And wanting it to hurt feels like there’s someone drilling a hole in her chest.   
“It’s 4 in the morning.”   
“I can’t stay.”   
“Does she need you? Do you need me?”   
Shaw watches Root’s face fall.   
“Something like that.”   
Root turns her back and Shaw doesn’t see her for six months.   
She knows what hurt’s supposed to feel like but for the first time ever, she doesn’t have to pretend. No one knows what’s been going on between the two of them, so no one’s particularly worried when Root drops off the face of the earth for six months.   
Shaw’s worried and she writes texts that she never sends what feels like a thousand times before giving up. If Root wanted to be here, she’d be here. She finds herself getting angry, angry that she could want to care, want to feel, only to have it all thrown in her face.   
She finds that angry is good, she can do angry.   
With Root gone, it feels like one of the only things she can do. 

Root wasn’t lying when she said something like that.   
The Machine needed her, for a week or two.   
She needed Sameen for far longer than that.   
So she ran. Never stopped running, never in a place long enough for Harold to find her, because she figured that after a while, he might look. Ran until the alarm bells in her head couldn’t be drowned out any longer and she had to return to New York.   
Running’s no good unless you’ve got some place to come home to. 

Root comes back to New York for the Machine but inevitably makes her way back to Sameen.   
“Red suits you.”   
They’re still fighting the long war and Sameen still works days behind the make up counter at the department store. The same department store where Root is now leaning against the counter, encased in black leather and carrying a motor cycle helmet.  
“Can I help you, madam?”   
“Can I help you, Sameen?”   
Her voice drips with lust, because in six months it’s easy to forget exactly how much you can want a person, even if that person is Sameen Shaw. This isn’t what she’d wanted, she’d wanted to come in, just to see that Shaw is ok, that she’s still as bullet proof as when she’d left. But even if Shaw can’t know Root needs her in every way, she can know that she needs her in that way.   
Shaw wants to say no, because she doesn’t need anyone’s help, let alone Root’s. But suddenly she’s powerless. She wants to say it’s the leather, and the curly hair and the way Root’s staring at her. But really, it’s the way she wants to need help, the way she wants to need Root, in more ways than just this.   
“I’ll see you at my place at midnight.”   
As Root walks away, she wants to tell her to be careful, but she doesn’t know how.

They end up meeting outside Shaw’s building because Root’s been waiting there for twenty minutes and because Shaw had thought it was a good idea to go to that bar around the corner, the one where shots are three for ten bucks.   
She stumbles and Root catches her, brushing cold fingertips on hot skin. Shaw hisses.   
“Your hands are fucking freezing.”   
It’s not the problem but it’s a problem. She fumbles with her keys, then drags Root up the stairs, her heart hammering a little less heavily while their fingers are intertwined. She tries not to think about it.   
“You’re too drunk for this.”   
They’re inside now, and Root’s thrown her coat over the back of the couch. She looks concerned, maybe even sad. Shaw can’t tell. She’s too drunk for that, but not too drunk for Root, not too drunk to feel. She stumbles forward again, into Root’s arms and finds her lips. It’s rough and angry and it’s everything Shaw’s managed to feel since Root went away. When they break apart, Root’s face is flushed in the dim light, and she’s breathless.   
Shaw feels powerful.   
So for the first time, she’s the one who drags Root to bed, and throws her there. It’s her hand around Root’s throat and her teeth on Root’s neck. When she disappears for a moment and returns with a kitchen knife, she thinks Root might come on the spot. She slashes Root’s thin blouse, nicking her skin along the way, watching in fascination as the spots of blood bloom onto the fabric of her sheets. She runs the very tip of the knife down Root’s sternum, gently, so gently, watching as the other woman’s eyes roll into the back of her head.   
She tries to ignore her baser urges. To make her hurt as much as Shaw’s been hurting without her.   
She’s too drunk to find toys, to spank, to tie up, all the things they would usually do. All the things that Root would usually do to her. Her head is spinning, and all she knows is that she’s holding a knife to a woman who she wants to care about.   
“Sameen…”   
And then her fingers are around the knife, and Shaw knows it must be hurting her and cutting into that delicate skin, so she lets go and Root tosses the knife to the ground. Shaw’s scared though, scared that Root’s going to try and talk, so she follows the path the knife just took with her tongue until Root’s fidgeting uncomfortably beneath her. The salty taste of her skin goes wonderfully with the taste of bad tequila still left in Shaw’s mouth. Root’s skirt is suddenly pushed up over her hip bones and Shaw occupies her mouth doing something other than talking. It’s better this way. No one’s going to say anything they regret this way.   
If Shaw had her way, no one would say anything at all. 

For a while, they can’t be in the same room as one another.   
Root’s never let anyone take control of her like that.   
Shaw is still angry and confused and…broken.   
She’s been broken for her whole life. But she’s never felt broken because of her inability to feel. It was just a fact: there was something not quite right about her. She never expected to want to feel fixed again.   
The first time it happens, she manages to make it feel natural. Root appears at the subway car, glances at her then looks away as if she’s the sun. Shaw excuses herself to walk Bear. Simple as.   
The next time is harder. Root’s looking over some schematics with Harold. Nerd stuff. Root comes barrelling down the stairway, carrying her dinner, hoping to chill out here with the dog rather than alone, in her cold apartment. She sees Root, trips on the last step and sends her burrito flying. Bear cleans it up. She doesn’t come back for three hours.   
She figures they’ll figure it out eventually. 

Figuring out how to be together again happens by accident.   
Well, when Shaw has John pinned up against the wall the next day, that’s what he insists anyway.   
She’s just sitting there in the subway, minding her own business, headphones in, mind off. That is until she notices Harold and John rushing off and up the stairs. And then she’s there, that stupid smile on her face, even though her eyes are sad. Shaw pulls her headphones out, which is exactly not what she wanted to do. Root makes her do things. It’s very annoying.  
“I don’t care, you know?”   
“You don’t care about what?”   
“I know you can’t love. I know that’s not how you’re programmed.”   
“I’m not your precious Machine. I’m not programmed…I just am.”   
“What I’m trying to say is I do care. About you. A lot. And I ran because I was too scared to need someone who would never need me in the same way. But I don’t think I’m scared anymore.”   
“You don’t think?”   
“I know you would love me if you could.”   
“Cocky.”   
“You like it.”   
Root’s right. Shaw does like it.   
And she would love her if she could.


End file.
